HootSuite adds more awesome to Hootlet with new features including AutoSchedule – a powerful new link share tool that determines the optimal time to schedule social media messaging. Now you can automatically queue messages throughout the day to maintain a consistent social media presence.

Originally released in 2009, Hootlet takes the URL you’re viewing and pops it into a message, ready to share across Twitter, Facebook and our other favorite social networks. No need to leave the web page!

New Personalized Options – Allows you to enable or disable the AutoSchedule drop-down menu

Hootlet is available as a Chrome Extension or Firefox Add-on. If you already have Hootlet installed, these new features will automatically be updated. Try Hootlet today and streamline your sharing:

Not using Firefox or Chrome? The Hootlet is also available as a Bookmarklet. Open your HootSuite dashboard, select Tools, then drag the “Get the HootSuite Hootlet” icon into your browser toolbar.

Hootlet How-Tos:

Using Hootlet couldn’t be easier! After clicking the Hootlet Icon, the title of the page and a shortened link is added to Hootlet’s Compose Box. Personalize the message then share or schedule for a later time. Quick and convenient!

AutoSchedule

Unsure when to send your post? Let Hootlet decide for you! AutoSchedule determines optimal posting times for you to efficiently queue up scheduled messages. Maximize reach without swamping your followers.

Step 1: After composing your message in Hootlet, select the Schedule Icon. A drop down menu will then appear.Step 2: Toggle the AutoSchedule switch to On. Messages scheduled with AutoSchedule will appear in Publisher with a Clock Icon next to them.

Note: AutoSchedule messages can be rescheduled the same way as regular messages. After rescheduling, the Clock Icon will disappear confirming your new scheduled time.

“It’s really quite simple – instead of our users manually selecting what time they want to schedule or post their social media messages using our Scheduling feature, they can opt to use our new AutoSchedule technology to optimize and automate the scheduling process. It’s as if we’ve added a little helper owl to our Hootlet. We want our users spending more time finding and sharing content and less time worrying about the best time of day to share it.”

Custom Content Sharing

Need to quickly share a quote or image? Custom Content Sharing can add highlighted text or selected images to Hootlet’s Compose Box with just a few clicks.

Sharing Text: Highlight a portion of text, right-click and select “Share current page via HootSuite Hootlet using selected text”. The text is then pasted into Hootlet’s Compose Box with a shortened link to the website you’re viewing.

Sharing Images: Right-click an image and select “Share image via HootSuite Hootlet.” The image will then be uploaded to Ow.ly. The text “[image]” and the link to the uploaded image will then be pasted into Hootlet’s Compose Box.

New Personalized Options

Access Hootlet’s settings in your browser menu to customize your Hootlet settings. From there, you can enable or disable the AutoSchedule drop-down menu. Be sure to click Save Options after you’re done.

Automate Authentically

Automation is one of the next steps in social media’s evolution. As social media becomes more widely adopted, brands and enterprises will need tools that can scale to their social presence – focusing on the speed and volume of responses as well as effort and cost reduction.

While the thought of robots sending Tweets seems to take the social out of social media, automating more mundane tasks like scheduling makes sense (Just like ATMs make a lot more sense most of the time than bank tellers). But, as HootSuite VP Marketing Ben Watson warns, social media should never lose the human touch.

Give it a try and see how Hootlet can help you simplify your sharing:

Not using Firefox or Chrome? The Hootlet is also available as a Bookmarklet. Open your HootSuite dashboard, select Tools, then drag “Get the HootSuite Hootlet” icon into your browser toolbar.

I've scheduled Tweets using Hootlet, but they are not appearing in my scheduler, so I can't tell if they are going to be sent or not. I've cleared my cache and reconnected the Twitter profile. Anyone out there that has resolved this issue? Thanks!

I am sure there is an easy fix for this, but I have yet to find it. When I use the auto scheduler for Facebook specifically, I want an image from the linked media to show, the way it does when I schedule it directly from Facebook. How can I make this happen?

Started using the auto scheduler today. I love this feature however I just entered a day's worth of posts and they're all bunched up in the morning for delivery. How can I tell it to spread 5 posts throughout the day? I'd like to be seen at different times of the day without posting hourly. Any suggestions?

I've finally signed up for Hootsuite, and I'm happy that you guys have built out this feature! Definitely saves me time from having to figure out when my audience would mostly be receptive to my tweets...

Does it schedule based on your time zone and then allow a suitable time spread between results, or does it look at your friends/likes/followers and then schedule based on that.

If it does not do this already, it would be really cool (although privacy settings on social websites may prevent this) if it could look all your followers/likes/friends and the times they are most active and then schedule it to hit the most people.

Also, it would be really cool if you could specify the region you want it to hit, international companies may want to target different messages at different time zones.

I am trying Autoschedule for the first time, and it says my message is On, but the message itself is still in my message bar up top, and is not showing up in my scheduled messages in publisher. If I click Send Message, it just opens the scheduling box and confirms that it's enabled.

How do I check to make sure my message has been saved/scheduled so I can go on to the next one?

Thank you for your kind words and insightful questions regarding AutoSchedule. Like all of our tools, we're always looking to improve on AutoSchedule's functionality as time goes on. Your suggestions and questions really help us figure out how HootSuite features are being used and ways we can improve them.

AutoSchedule uses a proprietary formula, so we can't give away our algorithm but I hope to answer a few questions we've been receiving:

- AutoSchedule posts for your local time that is set by your computer

- The timing takes into account the different social networks, so different networks will have different times

- There is no frequency control at this time

- There are no timing parameters that can be set (Ex. you cannot customize AutoSchedule to work from 9am - 5pm on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday)

- AutoSchedule currently only works for 5 profiles at a time

- AutoSchedule for mobile is currently not supported but it is on our roadmap

I hope that answers many of your questions. Any additional questions can be directed to @HootSuite_Help or the Help Desk. Our support rangers are best suited to answer any technical questions you might have. Your questions and feedback play a big role in guiding our product development. Thanks for your help!

Loving this new functionality but how many times will auto-schedule tweet each day, bufferapp allows you to set how many tweets to send and then you can see when they will go out, is this possible with Hootsuite?

Problem, though. The fact that we haven't the foggiest when a tweet is scheduled for until checking the schedule *after* scheduling it is troubling. <----mouthful

Meaning, I already use a couple of advanced free tools to know best times to tweet & blog (http://j.mp/When2Blog ;). But as a long-time marketer who realizes that the tiniest changes can often make some of the biggest differences to results (especially with something as "up in the air" as Twitter timing, generally speaking)... I'm concerned about not being able to sync my "magic" auto-schedule with, let's say, what SocialBro spits out. I know HootSuite is awesome, but my mama (and The Twilight Zone) taught me not to trust the unknown. ;-D

Any thoughts on when/if Hootsuite can "un-secretize" the magic timing so marketers can be more strategic and hands-on about this...?

Great feature! But how does auto-schedule determine the best day/time? What factors are taken into consideration? Does it look at our Followers to determine when they're online, or when most Twitter traffic takes place, or something else? I cannot find any information on this.

Auto-schedule question- If I'm posting to multiple networks, does it optimize for each individually or should I auto schedule for each network?

For example, found a blog post I want to share, should I auto-schedule for twitter then redo the process for FB then again for Google+ or just do it once? If I do it once are they all pushed at the same time? Which network gets priority?

Good idea. But half the time I get a message that asks me to submit a valid date. Also - why can't we have auto schedule on the web version of hootsuite app? Now I have to cut and paste tweets into hootsuite if I'm not sending a link from page I'm on....

As a big user of Buffer I was looking forward to this addition. To be clear, I like it, but it does need some tweaking. I let me Buffer run out yesterday so I could use this exclusively. So I went about adding my posts... but seeing that I had 8 posts over 4 channels all going out today has me worried about flooding my channels. Even selecting the day the post was to go out and you could optimize the time would be better (for me). Having no control at all, see a specific day loaded up, and then having to edit the posts doesn't save me any time.

Some parameters/configurations need to be provided so I can let you optimize what you are good at optimizing while I keep a certain level of control on my flow.

This is great. I'd just started using Bufferapp, but love the ability to keep as much as possible in one tool. The only thing is, I wonder what the schedule is? Are the "optimized times" a secret sauce? Is it specific to the user, their followers or just when most people are active?